alias /download to /project/drupal

Personally, I think we could get a lot of improvement out of one simple step. If we alias http://drupal.org/download to http://drupal.org/project/drupal on drupal.org, then we don't need to worry about any more complicated changes to project*.

Just to clarify, I believe the following aliases were made:
http://drupal.org/download --> http://drupal.org/node/3060
http://drupal.org/project/Drupal+project --> http://drupal.org/node/3060

Yay. That's more like it.

In addressing this issue, it seems that the previous path of http://drupal.org/project/drupal which should point to http://drupal.org/node/3060 is now broken. We need to get that fixed again since this will break a lot of links on the site.

I'm marking #273793: alias /download to /project/drupal as a duplicate and we'll just take care of that here.

Whoops. #288636: The page /project/drupal not found is the duplicate issue.

It occurs to me that as a result of all these aliases, all of the following point to the same page:

http://drupal.org/download
http://drupal.org/project/Drupal+project
http://drupal.org/project/drupal
http://drupal.org/node/3060

Doesn't google hate duplicate content like that, and penalize you for it? Would it not be better to use URL redirects for some of these, instead of simple aliases?

E.g. have http://drupal.org/project/drupal be the canonical URL, and tell apache to redirect http://drupal.org/download and http://drupal.org/project/Drupal+project to that?

yeah, that might be a better way to do it. I don't think chx has that kind of access, so i guess that's part of why it wasn't done like that originally.

While I think it'd be nicer to just enable http://drupal.org/project/path_redirect on d.o for this sort of thing, I know that's going to create friction. Instead of hacking the .htaccess for this, how about the following (admittedly hackish) patch for drupalorg's redirects.module? Tested this on a local d.o test profile site with anonymous page cache enabled as both anon and auth users. Seems to work charmingly.

won't we still have the problem that two urls will lead to the same content?

Google doesn't penalize redirects. Only 2 or more paths that "land" somewhere and have identical content.

We'd still like this, but it needs to be re-rolled for D6 d.o module. Any volunteers?

I have a patch done for this, I'll commit and deploy when I get home late tonight.

Any objections?
In D5 the menu items are case-sensitive, not so (on mysql) in D6.

Committed and deployed.

I'm also open to improvements and suggestions for path_redirect if it ever might be useful for drupal.org.

I think we'll definitely want path_redirect here, especially once we move to different subsites as per the d.o redesign and need a solution to the gigantic link-rot problem that will entail.